A Circular Gingerbread City

Welcome to Gingerbread City

This year’s theme Recycled City takes centre stage on our gingerbread building site. Drawing inspiration from our expertise in material reuse—including projects like 180 Piccadilly and our Full Circle to Reuse guide—we’ve created a busy gingerbread deconstruction site. This edible masterpiece reveals the unseen potential of reuse and the role of structural engineers in unlocking the potential of existing materials and elements.

At our gingerbread site, waste is minimised, and the lifecycle of materials is maximised through reuse, repair and recycling. This comes to life with every delicious detail including stockpiled chocolate wrappers and pieces broken during construction collected to be repurposed or recycled.

Our scene features specialist gingerbread workers carefully recording, sorting, and stockpiling materials for future projects. Wherever possible, components like the Polo Mint Columns and gingerbread walls are retained at their highest value. When that’s not feasible, these elements are recycled or reimagined into new uses—illustrating a fully circular gingerbread economy.

Visit The Gingerbread City

Material Passport

Name: Gingerbread Walls & Floorplates

Manufacturer: Charlotte Hitchens - Senior Engineer

Ingredient List: Flour, rye flour, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, lemon juice, eggs, margarine, honey & sugar

Current function & potential next use: Gingerbread walls and floorplates are carefully dismantled. Larger intact pieces are preserved for reuse, potentially serving as new floors or demountable deck units.

Smaller broken pieces, unsuitable for reuse, are graded and repurposed as rubble fill for construction or groundwork projects.

Name: Polo Mint Columns

Manufacturer: Eliza Eldred - Senior Marketing Executive

Ingredient List: Sugar, glucose syrup, modified starch, and mint oils. Joined together with icing cement.

Current function & potential next use: Whole Polo Mint columns are stockpiled for testing and reuse in future structures, retaining their original purpose.
Fragments unfit for reuse are sorted into a recycling skip, ready to be remade into new columns or downcycled into minty rubble fill.

Name: Strawberry Pencil Crane

Manufacturer: Matt Lockwood - Senior Engineer

Current Function & Potential Next Use: Strawberry pencils, used to form the crane boom, originally featured a sweet sherbet filling. This filling was stored and then repurposed to create a festive sherbet snowman, ensuring no part went to waste.

Name: Disco Wrecking Ball

Manufacturer: Pablo Durán Millán - Computational Engineer

Ingredient List: Silver balls & a broken ping pong ball

Current function & potential next use: The wrecking ball is a scaled down version of a giant disco ball currently living at our offices that was salvaged from a real deconstruction site nearby.

Our homage to this was made from a broken ping pong ball, well used from our pizza and table tennis nights at the office.

Name: Chocolate wrappers

Manufacturer: Cadbury

Current function & potential next use: Leftover chocolate wrappers have been collected and are now stored in a skip on site, ready for recycling or repurposing.
These materials may find new life as decorative elements or furnishing in future projects.

Manufacturer: Maryam Jalali - Engineer

Ingredients: Aluminium foil

Current Function & Potential Next Use: Foil wrappers from the Polo Mint columns have been reformed and transformed into I-beams, ready to be integrated into future structures.